Just a Little Bit Odd
No air conditioning. That makes two places I’ve been so far without air conditioning, since my hotel didn’t either. And I called down to the front desk, the old 0 on the hotel room phone, to say that perhaps my air conditioning is out of order. Turns out, “There’s no air conditioning in this building, ma’am. So you’ll want to make sure your windows are open and your blinds are closed. Also, there’s a fan in the closet.”
Well, okay then. That’s embarrassing. I imagine the hotel clerk looked at his compatriot for the evening hours at the front desk, and he probably said, “Spoiled girl from the suburbs. That’s what you get when you bid low on priceline, darlin’.”
I’m actually okay with this. I can handle. But Robb couldn’t. I’m sure he is much happier in his perfectly temperatured heaven than he would be in this stuffy town. (And I do realize that is a ridiculous statement of its own. Of course he is happier there.) If he were here, he would declare we were never coming back. I can hear him. “Vail is hot. You’d think for such a beautiful and expensive city, they would have A/C.”
The coffee shop is my favorite kind… albeit hot. All the baristas have their hair piled high, up off their necks. I wonder if each one has a wet, cool paper towel folded inside her bra. That’s a waitressing secret. Learned it when I was 16, a new waitress in the food industry. One of the Lifers told me that secret. It’s the only way to make it through a shift without sweating into people’s drinks.
In this place, there is eclectic furniture, chalkboard menus, exposed brick walls, distressed wood accents. Such charm. I’m sitting in a booth that should really belong to a party of four. But as long as there is one other table with four chairs, I’m going to assume nobody needs this one.
Things here are just a little bit odd.
Women keep walking in here in dresses that I cannot wrap my mind around. Largely because the dresses can’t really wrap themselves around these bodies. There are two firemen, though. And I’m pretty confident that there must be a prerequisite of ‘exceedingly handsome’ in the job description.
The girls sitting at the table next to me… three girls, every one of them obnoxious. They’re all on their phones. Talking excitedly about whomever they get a text from. And the loud girl slips into the negro jive of a large black woman when she answers her phone. They burst into song, a few phrases at a time. Loudly. And I shudder to think how I must have been at their age.
Self awareness comes with age and time. And sometimes, it still doesn’t.
A guy walks in with long blond hair, cargo shorts, black socks and sneakers, and a skateboard between his back and his backpack. “I just got done with like a two-and-a-half hour skate. I want to take a shower and then go lay in the river. Can I have one of those peach pear yummy-dums?”
I didn’t see ‘yummy-dum’ on the menu. Clearly he’s a regular. With his own language. And his own flirty relationship with the baristas.
It’s all just very odd around here. In a lot of the best ways.
